


i watched a sorrow at dawn

by kaijuburgers



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Implied Kaidan/Male Shepard, M/M, Mostly just writing practice, Not Beta Read, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25980685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaijuburgers/pseuds/kaijuburgers
Summary: Jeff “Joker” Moreau realised he was in love with his commanding officer when he listened to him die.-Joker has a realisation post ME2 opening. The Cerberus agent who comes to recruit him takes full advantage of it.
Relationships: Jeff "Joker" Moreau/Male Shepard
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	i watched a sorrow at dawn

Jeff “Joker” Moreau realised he was in love with his commanding officer when he listened to him die. When Shepard dragged him from the SR-1’s cockpit and into an emergency escape shuttle, and refused to get in himself. Every time he closed his eyes to sleep, Joker remembered the sound of the Commander’s breath over the comms link, how it’d gone from the controlled breathing of a career soldier to something heavy and panicked and instinctual, and then had fallen to silence.

The investigation into the destruction of the Normandy was bullshit, and Joker knew it. The Citadel officials who’d ordered it had wanted a quick and painless answer, a way to end any speculation as soon as possible. Blaming the Geth and helping fund a memorial to Shepard on Elysium was an easy way out, and so they’d taken it.

The woman who tracked him back to his studio apartment on the Citadel knew it was bullshit too, and she made that no secret. Her voice was a smooth purr that promised more than her words did, and Joker liked to think he wouldn’t have trusted her one bit even if she hadn’t turned up at his home unannounced and holding a Harpy IV. But when she spoke, a spark of hope lit up in him.

“The Council never put their full resources into looking for Commander Shepard,” she said, perching on his nightstand and looking far too perfect for comfort, the movement knocking his half drunk bottle of Elasa dangerously close to the edge. “They never valued him or what he did for them- saving the Citadel, even saving the Council. And then they never looked for him, just declared him MIA. You know as well as I do that they could have done so much more.”

Joker felt himself sink further into his cheap mattress. It wasn’t that he disagreed with what she said. The Council had sent a representative to the Commander’s funeral (or at least as close to a funeral they could have without a body)- a snide turian who looked like she hated having to be there. It would have taken every ounce of willpower that Joker had to not start a fight if it wasn’t for the way that Kaidan had looked at him, a sadness in his eyes that was all too familiar, begging him to let it be. The Council had done wrong by the Commander, and this woman was right to say it. But that didn’t mean Joker trusted she was saying it for the right reasons.

“I know who you are.” He glanced down at her pistol and back again, slow enough that she knew that he knew. “I know who you’re working with. Why are you here?”

She smiled, the fake empty smile of a newsreader or a waitress trying to deal with a difficult customer, and Joker wondered briefly how far he could push her until she gave up with whatever kind of recruitment she was attempting and just shot him in an attempt to cover her tracks. “What if I told you Commander Shepard didn’t have to stay dead.”

Joker felt his muscles twitch and he rose from the bed with a clenched jaw. Maybe this woman believed he would be a fool, who’d leap at any chance to hope the Commander was alive, but he wasn’t. He’d listened to it happen, known that the Commander had chosen to die for him. He’d been to the Commander’s funeral, sat in silence with Kaidan afterwards to drink swigs from a whiskey bottle together, let that unspoken feeling they both knew was there stay unspoken.

“I’d call you a liar. Shepard’s dead. I was there when he died.”

She smiled even wider, perfect white teeth gleaming like the sun-bleached bones of some small animal as she reached her left arm out to activate her omnitool. “The Commander _did_ die, that’s true. But he doesn’t have to stay that way.”

The video footage was blurry and obscured, and it took Joker a while to even realise what he was looking at. When he realised, the blood drained from his face. He looked back at her and opened his mouth, but found that no words could come out. He stepped closer, unable to look away.

“It is him,” she said, as if she were running through some kind of multi-branch script to convince him to join them. “That’s really the Commander. Not a clone, not an AI. That’s all just him, flesh and blood and implants.”

“How do I know." Joker’s mouth and throat were dry when he finally managed to speak. “How do I know that’s really him? How do I know this isn’t some trick?”

“You don’t," she admitted. “You have to trust me.”

Joker looked away from the footage and towards her and laughed, dry and bitter. “That’s the thing. I don’t trust you.”

The woman frowned and her fingers twitched. _A second_ , Joker thought, _it would probably take at maximum a second for her to decide he wasn’t worth the effort of recruiting and should be silenced instead_. They both froze for a moment, only their eyes moving, until she dropped her hand from near her holster.

“Wait,” she said, changing the omnitool display from to a ship that Joker knew only too well. Joker’s heart caught in his throat again. “There’s something more.”

He stood there watching the footage and, much as he wanted to think he wasn’t this easily manipulatable, he wanted to trust her. He wanted to believe that she could give him back his ship and his commanding officer, that she could undo what the past two years had taken from him.

“You don’t have to decide now,” she said slowly, eyeing him in a way that made him feel like she was mentally dissecting him. “I’ll leave you with a comms channel frequency. If you decide it’s worth it- if it’s worth trusting us- you can use that to get in contact with us.”

Three days later, Joker opened that comms channel frequency.


End file.
